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If you invested $1 a day, starting when you were born

stockchoker.com

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Re: If you invested $1 a day, starting when you were born

#51

Post by huxley »

peter303 wrote: post #32

A variant is start with one penny a day and increase by one penny each day. People are adults by 10,000 days, middle age by 20,000 and die around 30,000. The accumulated amount is triangle numbers of days, or the day count squared, then halved. That would be a half million (10K^2/200), 2 million and 4.5 million dollars respectively for these 10K-round numbers. These are actually feasible investment amounts.

Investing a surplus $100-200 a day everyday of your adult life may stretch the definition of feasible for most people.

But on the positive side, the amount didn't double every day or you'd seriously distort the stock market in a matter of weeks.

Re: If you invested $1 a day, starting when you were born

#52

Post by sadkingbilly »

nkrisc wrote: post #47
takno wrote: post #17

I invested my spare money in a computer, and it's definitely paid back more than the S&P 500 in salary. Using up limited funds in childhood on financial investments is just madness

I really do not think the creator of this site is suggesting that children invest in the stock market. After all, how exactly does a 1 day old child do so? Instead, I think this is just an interesting tool demonstrating a "what if?" scenario. That said, investing a dollar a day on behalf of your child and tracking the progress of the account with them over time would be a cool way to teach them about money. You could…

Instead of $1/day, do $365/year to limit transaction fees.

You could even offer to let them withdraw the dividend each month as an allowance or let it reinvest.

Re: If you invested $1 a day, starting when you were born

#54

Post by bduerst »

marvel_boy wrote: post #31
bobbyhotpockets wrote: post #18

Is inflation included? Surprising to see such an important detail absent from the explanation of how returns are calculated.

It is not. Neither transaction costs.

Wouldn't transactions costs make this negative?

Re: If you invested $1 a day, starting when you were born

#55

Post by Someone1234 »

ovi256 wrote: post #50
Someone1234 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just do it in lump sums twice a year or similar. Plus unmanaged funds like indexes have lower recurring fees than managed funds.

That would reduce the ROI, because doing it often (every day) approximates continuous exponential growth (e ^ x) while doing it in batches reduces to power growth (1 + r) ^ x. See the effect this has in the example given here: http://math2.org/math/general/interest.htm

Until you include fees...

Re: If you invested $1 a day, starting when you were born

#56

Post by theandrewbailey »

mesozoic wrote: post #8

Too bad I had a lot of trouble making money as an infant.

I had trouble making money for the next 10 or so years. I couldn't go to that many places or do too many things. And I had to live with miserly and cheap old people. Childhood sucked.

Re: If you invested $1 a day, starting when you were born

#57

Post by Flammy »

toado85 wrote: post #28

Hey guys... I made the page. Just saw lots of traffic coming from here so figured I'd come check it out. A couple things I figured I should address after reading the comments: 1) Yahoo!'s historic S&P 500 data does not factor in dividends. So the returns would likely be 1-2% higher each year (which over time makes a very big difference). I should probably add a note on the page mentioning this. Here was my conundrum…

Hey Toado,

Your webpage gave me a screen takeover popup that was unavoidable on my phone :/ Even hitting back button would re-launch the popup.

Chrome on iOS if it helps.

Re: If you invested $1 a day, starting when you were born

#58

Post by toado85 »

Flammy wrote: post #57
toado85 wrote: post #28

Hey guys... I made the page. Just saw lots of traffic coming from here so figured I'd come check it out. A couple things I figured I should address after reading the comments: 1) Yahoo!'s historic S&P 500 data does not factor in dividends. So the returns would likely be 1-2% higher each year (which over time makes a very big difference). I should probably add a note on the page mentioning this. Here was my conundrum…

Hey Toado, Your webpage gave me a screen takeover popup that was unavoidable on my phone :/ Even hitting back button would re-launch the popup. Chrome on iOS if it helps.

Ewww... never heard of that happening. I tested on iPad with Chrome / Safari / Firefox. Is this on iPhone? If so, which one?

Re: If you invested $1 a day, starting when you were born

#59

Post by AngrySkillzz »

ryandrake wrote: post #10

Interesting, but I doubt people tend to invest this consistently and regularly. They probably have an easy time investing when times are good (and they actually have a few extra bucks to gamble with), and tend to not invest when times are bad (they're trying to eat). Take someone who was doing pretty good during the tech and real estate bubbles, and decided to invest their spare change in 1998, 1999, 2005 and 2006, b…

You still end up ahead. [1] Even if you invest at the worst possible times, investing early and over a long period of time will still make you wealthy. This isn't necessarily the case in all situations; I think you would have lost money in the Japanese stock market over the past decade if you don't consider dividends/potential deflation. But it has held for the US market for a long time.

[1] http://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market-...

Re: If you invested $1 a day, starting when you were born

#60

Post by tunesmith »

toado85 wrote: post #28

Hey guys... I made the page. Just saw lots of traffic coming from here so figured I'd come check it out. A couple things I figured I should address after reading the comments: 1) Yahoo!'s historic S&P 500 data does not factor in dividends. So the returns would likely be 1-2% higher each year (which over time makes a very big difference). I should probably add a note on the page mentioning this. Here was my conundrum…

Through Yahoo's api, can't you use "Adj. Close"? That's what I do for historical S&P.
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